Civics and Health | Page 4

to give the child the essentials
of arithmetic, reading, and geography. "We teach (or try to teach) what
our classes are examined in. If you want a subject taught, you must test

a class in it and hold a teacher responsible for results, and examinations
are mercilessly unhygienic, you know."
4. Teachers believe that they get better results for their children from
teaching hygiene informally and indirectly than from stated formal
lessons. Whether instruction should be informal or formal is merely a
question of method to be determined by results. What the results are,
can be determined by principals, superintendents, and students of
education. It is easy to understand how at the time of a fever epidemic
children could be taught as much in one week about infection, disease
germs, antiseptics, value of cleanliness, etc., as in five or ten months
when vivid illustration is lacking. Physicians themselves learn more
from one epidemic of smallpox than from four years of book study. To
make possible and to require a daily shower bath will undoubtedly do
more to inculcate habits of health than repeated lessons about the skin,
pores, evaporation, and discharge of impurities.
If one illustration is better than ten lessons, if an open window is worth
more than all that text-books have to say about ventilation, if a seat
adjusted to the child is better than an anatomical chart, this does not
mean that instruction in hygiene should cease. On the contrary, it
means that provision should be made for every teacher to open
windows, to adjust desks, to use the experience of individual children
for the education of the class. If the rank and file of teachers have not
hitherto been sufficiently observant of physiological and hygienic facts,
if they are unprepared from their own lives to detect or to furnish
illustrations for the child, this again does not mean that the child should
be denied the illustrations, but that the teacher should either have
instruction and experience to incite interest and to stimulate powers of
observation, or else be asked to give place to another teacher who is
able to furnish such qualifications.
5. Children, like adults, can be interested in other people, in rules of
conduct, in social conditions, in living and working relations more
easily than in their own bodies. The normal, healthy child thinks very
little of himself apart from the other boys and girls, the games, the
studies, the animals, the nature wonders, the hardships that come to him

from the outside. So true is this that one of the best means of mitigating
or curing many ailments is to divert the child's attention from himself to
things outside of himself that he can look at, hear, enjoy. The power to
concentrate attention upon oneself is a sign either of a diseased body, a
diseased mind, or a highly trained mind. To study others and to
recognize the similarity between others and oneself is as natural as the
body itself. Teachers are consulting this line of easiest access to
children's attention when they honor children according to cleanliness
of hands, of teeth, of shoes. Human interest attaches to what parks or
excursions are doing for sickly children, how welfare work is
improving factory employees, how smallpox is conquered by
vaccination, how insurance companies refuse to take risks upon the
lives of men or women addicted to the excessive use of alcohol or
tobacco.
Other people's interests--tenement conditions, factory rules--can be
described in figures and actions that appeal to the imagination and
impress upon the mind pictures that are repeatedly reawakened by
experience and observation on the playground, at home, on the way to
school or to work. "Once upon a time--" will always arrest attention
more quickly than "The human frame consists--." What others think of
me helps me to obey law--statutory, moral, or hygienic--more than
what I know of law itself. How social instincts dominate may be
illustrated by an experience in advertising a public bath near a
thoroughfare traveled daily by thousands of working girls. I prepared a
card to be distributed among these girls that began: "A cool, refreshing
bath, etc." This card was criticised by one who knows the ways of girls
and women, as follows: "Of course you get no success when you have a
man stand on the street corner and pass out cards telling girls to get
clean. Every girl that is worth while is affronted by the insinuation."
Acting upon this expert advice, we then got out a neatly printed card
reading as follows: "For a clear complexion, sprightly step, and
bounding vitality, visit the Center Market Baths, open from 6 A.M. to 9
P.M. daily." The board of managers shook their sage masculine heads
and reluctantly gave permission to issue these appeals. Woman's
judgment was vindicated,